Electrophysiological revelations of trial history effects in a color oddball search task.

In visual oddball search tasks, viewing a no-target scene (i.e., no-target selection trial) leads to the facilitation or delay of the search time for a target in a subsequent trial.

Training improves the capacity of visual working memory when it is adaptive, individualized, and targeted.

The current study investigated whether training improves the capacity of visual working memory using individualized adaptive training methods. Two groups of participants were trained for two targeted processes, filtering and consolidation. Before and after the training, the participants, including those with no training, performed a lateralized change detection task in which one side of the visual display had to be selected and the other side ignored.

Category-based inhibition of focused attention across consecutive trials.

The distractor previewing effect (DPE) refers to the behavioral phenomenon that search times increase for oddball targets containing features recently associated with the absence of a target. Previous work using a color-oddball search task showed that the DPE covaried with the N2pc component of the event-related potential (an index of attention allocation) but not with other components, suggesting that the DPE reflects shifts in attentional sets. We sought to determine whether the previous results could generalize to a category-oddball search task.

When crowding meets binocular rivalry: challenges for object perception.

Both crowding and binocular rivalry impair object perception, but their influence on object perception has so far only been investigated in separate fields. Three experiments investigated the joint influences of crowding and rivalry on object perception (orientation discrimination). Experiment 1 investigated how crowding and rivalry influence orientation discrimination together.

Electrophysiological evidence of alcohol-related attentional bias in social drinkers low in alcohol sensitivity.

Low sensitivity to the acute effects of alcohol is a known risk factor for alcoholism. However, little is known concerning potential information-processing routes by which this risk factor might contribute to increased drinking. We tested the hypothesis that low-sensitivity (LS) participants would show biased attention to alcohol cues, compared with their high-sensitivity (HS) counterparts.

Span, CRUNCH, and beyond: working memory capacity and the aging brain.

Neuroimaging data emphasize that older adults often show greater extent of brain activation than younger adults for similar objective levels of difficulty. A possible interpretation of this finding is that older adults need to recruit neuronal resources at lower loads than younger adults, leaving no resources for higher loads, and thus leading to performance decrements [Compensation-Related Utilization of Neural Circuits Hypothesis; e.g.

Electrophysiological evidence of feature-based inhibition of focused attention across consecutive trials.

Monitoring the visual environment for targets has evolutionary and ecological significance. Exploration of the visual scene can be hypothesized to use "saliency maps" representing the priorities allocated to different locations and features, which change dynamically based on previous experience. This is supported by the observation that sequential effects influence the speed and accuracy of visual search tasks.

Multiple levels of stimulus representation in visual working memory.

Object recognition presumably involves activation of multiple levels of representation. Here we use the encoding-related lateralization (ERL) method [Gratton, G. The contralateral organization of visual memory: A theoretical concept and a research tool.

Evidence of partial response activation in a memory-search task.

Studies using the lateralized readiness potential (LRP; an index of hand-specific motor preparation), suggest that the motor system can be activated on the basis of partial information, providing support for a parallel view of the human information processing system. However, data to the contrary have been obtained in memory-search paradigms, leading Heil et al. [Psychological Research 62 (1999) 289] to propose that hand-specific motor preparation cannot occur in parallel with memory scanning.